A proxy caching scheme for continuous media streams on the Internet

Abstract

We propose a proxy caching scheme for continuous media data that stores a portion of continuous media stream or entire stream on the Internet. By caching the initial fraction of the stream data, service startup latency can be reduced, and by varying the size of the fraction of stream to be cached according to variation of stream popularity, we can utilize the cache space efficiently and maximize the amount of data served directly from the cache. We use the caching utility of each stream for cache replacement, which represents the correlation between popularity of a stream and the size of storage space that is allocated for a stream. We also propose the method of measuring popularity of continuous media stream using the amount of data played back by clients. Finally, we have performed simulations to evaluate our caching policy.